Private jm-1 Page 16

  “He’s fine. But I…” My face got warm. “Some memory from the war shook loose. I want to tell you.”

  Justine closed the yearbook and looked at her watch. “Damn it, Jack. I have to go. I’m meeting Christine on Melrose in twenty minutes. If I’m not there, she’ll bolt. Here’s an idea. Come with me. We can talk on the way in the car.”

  “No, you go ahead,” I said. “This can wait. Honest. Tommy’s fine. I’m fine.”

  Justine snapped her briefcase closed and picked up her handbag. She stood and put her hand on my shoulder.

  Our eyes locked. She smiled, and for a second I thought she was going to lean down and kiss me. But she didn’t do that.

  “Wish me luck,” she said. “I’ll need it with this girl.”

  I said, “Good luck.” She said she’d see me later. Then I watched Justine through the multipaned windows as she walked up the street to her car and left me all alone.

  It’s what you deserve, Jack, I told myself.

  Chapter 89

  Justine had been seesawing for days between mindless optimism and gutless despair. If the e-mails Sci and Mo-bot had found on Jason Pilser’s computer could be trusted, the Street Freeks were going for another kill in just days. They had to be stopped somehow.

  She could just about picture their target: a teen girl who was either cocky or naive, but either way, vulnerable to being talked into a careless rendezvous, and then, possibly, her death.

  Justine’s head hurt thinking about it. She felt she was so close to the killer, but she knew she might fail anyway.

  On the other hand, Christine Castiglia was a force for good. There was reason to believe that she could help Private get ahead of the killers before Monday, before another girl died.

  Justine parked her car on the busy block on Melrose where she and Christine had agreed to meet. She was ten minutes early.

  Traffic was heavy, and the air quality was poor. Justine dialed up the air conditioner, then she took her BlackBerry out of her handbag and put it on the dash.

  She scanned the street, saw kids in clumps, hanging out on the sidewalk.

  None of them was Christine.

  As noon passed, Justine had a bad thought that started to grow. Christine had defied her mother by asking for this meeting. It had been courageous to do that. But had the girl changed her mind? Or had something happened to Christine?

  By twelve fifteen, Justine was sure of it.

  At twelve thirty, she called Private and checked her voice mail. There was no message from Christine.

  Justine tossed the phone back onto the dash. Her headache was making spidery inroads into both hemispheres of her brain.

  She really wanted to talk to Jack. But there was a danger in seeing him outside the office. Coffee with him at the Rose Cafe had pulled hard on old feelings, made her wistful and sentimental about what they’d once had.

  They had both been so stupid in the past. For her part, she’d thought she could get him to open up and tell her his feelings. But Jack apparently couldn’t do that kind of intimacy, and Justine couldn’t do without it.

  She’d bought him a mug with a happy face and lettering on it that read: “I’m fine. Really. How are you?” Jack had laughed and used the mug, but he still kept big parts of himself locked away from her. He never saw why talking about his inner life was good for him. He didn’t seem to need to do it.

  Jack was gorgeous and he knew it. Women flattered him, flipped their hair, touched him, gave him their phone numbers. Jack was always modest about his good looks, probably because he could be.

  She and Jack had fought, made up spectacularly, fought again, and when they broke up the third or fourth time, Jack had slept with an actress. So she and Bobby Petino had spent a memorable night dealing with their own purely sexual tension-and Jack had found out. Of course he had-Jack knew everybody’s secrets.

  She and Jack had another reconciliation, but both had brought so much past hurt to the party, the relationship could only fail. They’d broken up again a year ago, and now any thoughts of getting back together came with the knowledge of how the relationship would end…

  She was startled by a tap on the window.

  Christine Castiglia, pale in a black hoodie and jeans, looked nervously up and down the street, then opened the car door and got inside.

  “Dr. Smith, I had this idea?” Christine said. “We should go to the coffee shop where I saw those boys that time?”

  Justine smiled at Christine. Hope spread its great, wide wings and soared. “What an excellent idea,” Justine said.

  Chapter 90

  This was where it had all started, wasn’t it? All of the murders so far.

  Becki’s House of Pie was a hole-in-the-wall eatery on Hyperion. It was gloomy, and it smelled of coffee and the disinfectant a busboy was using to mop the floor. There was an electric clock on the wall above the cash register. It made a loud tick every time the second hand moved.

  Justine wondered what the Schoolgirl killers were doing right now, at this very second.

  “This is where we sat,” Christine said, pointing to a red vinyl booth with a table scarred by decades of blue-plate specials.

  A picture window alongside the booth faced onto the lunch hour traffic streaming up and down Hyperion. A motorcycle farted through a yellow light, the rider’s fat ass slowly moving away.

  Christine said, “I sat here. My mom sat there. I can still see it.”

  The waitress had bushy gray hair, a pinafore over her blue velvet dress, and a name tag reading “Becki.” She looked as though she’d been in the house of pie for fifty years.

  Justine ordered coffee, black. Christine asked for tuna salad, then said, “To be honest, Dr. Smith? I wouldn’t want to get someone in trouble if I’m not sure.”

  “Don’t worry about that, Christine. Your word alone can’t hurt anyone. We’ll still need proof. It’s not that easy to convict somebody of murder.”

  “The van stopped in the middle of the road,” Christine said, pointing to the cross street. “I looked away, and when I turned back? These two guys were swinging the blond girl into the van.”

  “Would you like to look at some pictures for me?”

  “Sure. If it will help.”

  Justine got the three heavy yearbooks out of her briefcase, then pushed the short stack across the table to the girl.

  Justine sipped her coffee and watched Christine scan the pages. The girl paused to examine not just the portraits, but the group and candid photos too. For a few long moments, she stared at a black-and-white group shot under a heading “The Staff of The Wolverine.”

  “What do you see?” Justine finally asked.

  Christine stabbed the photo with a finger, pointing out a boy in a line with nine or ten other kids.

  Then Christine exclaimed, “It’s him.”

  Justine turned the book around and pulled it toward her.

  The caption identified the yearbook staff and their graduating classes. She checked the caption against the students’ faces, then flipped to the portraits of the class of 2006.

  The boy Christine had stabbed with her chewed-up fingernail had dark hair, a nose that could be called pointy, and ears that might be described as sticking out.

  Suddenly Justine was so wired, she felt as if she could run electricity for all of East Los Angeles off her mood.

  Was Christine’s memory this good? Or was she just trying to please Justine like her mother had said she would?

  Justine said, “Christine? It was nighttime, right? The van stopped for a minute, and the kids were moving. Are you sure this is the boy you saw?”

  Christine was a bright girl, and she understood the potential problem instantly.

  “I worried that I wouldn’t be able to recognize him? But I do. Like I said the first time, Dr. Smith, I’ll never forget his face.”

  “Okay, Christine. Great job. And now that face has a name. This is Rudolph Crocker.”

  Chapter 91

 
In the beginning, Justine had fought Sci’s suggestion to install a high-tech dashboard computer in her Jaguar. It would mess up the look of the car, and also guaranteed that she’d never have a moment away from work.

  Sci had won the battle using undeniable logic, and now Justine silently thanked him. The little box, with its seven-inch touch screen, connected up with Private’s international network and forensic databases. It also did engine diagnostics, had a rear-obstacle-detection system, and played CDs.

  Ingenious little box.

  Justine punched Rudolph Crocker’s name into a search engine. As the compact computer brain searched the Internet, the screen filled with a list of men named Rudolph Crocker. There were Rudolph Crockers in many states and in diverse professions: doctors, lawyers, firemen, a handyman, a pool boy, and an underwear model in Chicago.

  There were no Rudolph Crockers with a criminal record, but there were three men with that name in greater Los Angeles.

  The first had been born in Sun Valley in 1956 and worked as a schoolteacher in Santa Cruz until his early retirement in ’07.

  The second Crocker on the list was an equities analyst at a brokerage firm called Wilshire Pacific Partners.

  Justine tapped the keyboard, and the firm’s website came up on her screen.

  There was a tab, “Who We Are,” and Justine clicked on it and scrolled down the list of personnel, which displayed bios and thumbnail portraits.

  Rudolph Crocker was the seventh party down.

  Justine stared at the small picture. She had to be sure that this slick business-style portrait matched the one in an old yearbook-but it was undeniable. Indisputable. This Crocker was the same one who had graduated from Gateway Prep in ’06.

  Justine called the office. Her calls to Jack, Sci, and Mo-bot went straight to voice mail. She knew everyone was working flat-out. Sci and Mo were immersed in the computer angle of the Schoolgirl case. Jack, Cruz, and Del Rio were working the NFL fix and Shelby Cushman’s murder.

  The Wendy Borman connection was Justine’s brainstorm, and she had to take it to the end. Sci had isolated two male DNA samples from Wendy Borman’s clothing. The samples didn’t match anyone on file, living or dead, so she would have to collect a DNA sample from Crocker for comparison.

  And she’d have to do it herself.

  Or would she?

  An idea bloomed. She happened to know someone who was completely up to speed on the case and as motivated to catch the Schoolgirl killer as she was.

  Unfortunately, this person happened to hate her guts.

  Chapter 92

  Justine had been aware of Lieutenant Nora Cronin for years. Cronin had five years in homicide and was known to be an honest cop. She would’ve had a big future, but back-talking her superiors had stunted her career. Also, her weight problem probably didn’t help, especially not here in LA.

  Bobby Petino, however, thought Cronin was the real deal and a winner. He had talked her up to Chief Fescoe, who had assigned Cronin to the Schoolgirl case, reporting directly to him.

  Justine knew that Cronin had worked hard on the case since Kayla Brooks was strangled two years ago, and that she was conceivably more frustrated than Justine. Cronin had more at stake too. The Schoolgirl case was her number one job.

  After parking her car on Martel, a narrow road in West Hollywood, Justine walked a dozen yards to where Nora Cronin was lying on her stomach, peering underneath an ancient Ford junker parked at the curb.

  “Hey, Nora, it’s me,” Justine said.

  “Oh, happy day,” Cronin muttered. She came out from under the car with a knife in her gloved hand. She gave the knife to a uniform, saying, “Edison, bag this, tag it, take it to the lab.”

  “Yes, ma’am, Nora, ma’am. Forthwith.”

  Cronin stripped off her latex gloves and scowled at Justine. “So what’s the deal, Justine? I hear you and Bobby are kaput, and you didn’t even tell me. I have to wonder: Are you still even working the Schoolgirl case?”

  “Private is under contract to the city. We’re doing this for free. No billable hours.”

  Justine waited for Cronin’s next crack, but it didn’t come. Cronin put a hand on her hip and said, “Is your air conditioner working?”

  The two women sat in the Jag with the air on high while Justine briefed Nora on Christine Castiglia.

  “In 2006, Castiglia saw two kids toss a girl who looked like Wendy Borman into a black van. An hour ago, she identified one of them. I think Wendy Borman might have been the first schoolgirl in the spree.”

  “I know about that Castiglia girl. Kid was eleven at the time, right? Her mother put up a firewall to keep the cops away from her. You saying you trust her five years later to make a positive ID?”

  “Not entirely, no. I got Borman’s clothes out of evidence, ran them at our lab. The DNA is good,” Justine said to Cronin. “Two male single-source samples. But no bells went off in the database.”

  “So what do you want from me? I’m a little lost here.”

  “We have reason to believe that another murder is going down in two days.”

  “Oh, really? But you can’t tell me how you know this, right? So, I repeat, what do you want from me?”

  “Christine Castiglia saw a Gateway Prep decal on the kidnap van,” Justine said. She tapped buttons on the dashboard computer and called up the photo of Rudolph Crocker’s face.

  “This is the guy Christine Castiglia ID’d. Name is Rudolph Crocker. He graduated from Gateway in 2006. Now he’s a suit at a brokerage house. Christine is sure he’s the one she saw.”

  “Uh-huh. Now what, Justine?”

  “So, I’ve got a suspect over here,” Justine said, holding up one hand. “And I’ve got a DNA sample over here.” She held up the other hand. “If we can put this hand and this hand together, we might just put a bloody psychopath out of business.”

  “Saying I want to do it, I’d have to know everything you know,” Cronin said. “None of this ‘We have reason to believe’ crap. You hold anything back from me, I quit.”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t answer to you.”

  “No, you don’t. And you can’t bring anyone from LAPD into this without my okay. Okay?”

  “Yeah,” said Nora.

  She was smiling now. It was probably the first time Justine had seen a smile from her. “I’m gonna take a lotta crap for working with you. After all the names I’ve called you.”

  Justine nodded. “Deal?”

  “Deal.” They slapped high fives in the frigid air.

  “We’re going to make a great team,” said Justine.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Nora Cronin. “I still don’t particularly like you.”

  Justine finally smiled. “Oh, you will.”

  Chapter 93

  I was heading into the office, stuck in a swamp of traffic on Pico, when Mo-bot called me from the tech center.

  “Five minutes ago, our friends at the LAX Marriott made a call to a bottling plant in Reno asking for a donation to the State Troopers’ Widows Fund,” she said, her voice trilling with excitement. “The plant is owned by none other than Anthony Marzullo. Happy, Jack?”

  “Good catch, Mo. That’s excellent. But you know what I really want.”

  “To hear the sound of coins changing hands?” Mo laughed. “After the call to Nevada, Victor Spano called Kenny Owen on his mobile. They’re meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Bungalow four this afternoon.”

  Mo had been tapping into Kenny Owen’s and Lance Richter’s phones since they’d arrived in LA in advance of tomorrow’s game. We already knew that the professional handicappers expected the Titans to crush the Raiders by three touchdowns. And we knew that if the two refs could skew the calls, could make a seventeen-point spread hold up, tens of millions in illegal bets would slide over to the Marzullos’ side of the ledger.

  But Uncle Fred and his associates would want more than idle chitchat and suspicion. They’d need proof.

  I
called Del Rio, met him at the garage, and swapped my car for one of our Honda CR-Vs. The Honda was black with tinted windows, outfitted with cutting-edge wireless electronics.

  I drove myself and my wingman to Sunset, pulled the car under the porte cochere at the entrance to the Beverly Hills Hotel, and dropped Del Rio off.

  He pulled down the bill of his cap and adjusted his camera bag as he entered the hotel. Once he was inside, I looped around Sunset and parked on Crescent Drive, a hundred yards and a stucco wall away from the pretty white cottage in the lush garden surrounding the hotel.

  Del Rio kept me posted through his lapel mic as he planted the pin cams, one at the bungalow’s front door and another at the patio, and stuck three more “spider eyes” on windows facing into the three rooms.

  A long twelve minutes later, Del Rio was back in the CR-V, and the microcameras were streaming wireless AV to our laptops.

  The only things moving inside the bungalow were dust motes wafting upward in columns of sunlight.

  For all of his volatility, Del Rio could sit on a tail for ten hours without having to take a leak. I was still suffering mental whiplash from the earthquake and the devastating memory it had dislodged. After a half hour of staring at sunbeams, I had to say something or I was going to explode.

  “Rick. Did you take a look at Danny Young when I brought him out of the helicopter?”

  “Huh? Yeah. Why?”

  My voice was flat as I told him about my morning. I was a dead man talking, but I got to the point. I didn’t need to add color commentary. Del Rio had been there.

  “So let me get this straight,” Del Rio said when I’d finished. “You’re beating yourself up for leaving Jeff Albert in the Phrog and trying to save Danny Young? What about the other guys? We took a missile, Jack. And you landed the goddamn aircraft.”

  “Do you remember Albert?”

  “Sure. He was a good kid. They were all good kids. Jack, you were just a kid yourself.”